


Don't call me unless you're dying

by Jasmineblue



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 02:52:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5691877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jasmineblue/pseuds/Jasmineblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony isn't good with responsibilities, Steve doesn't deserve to suffer anymore, Bucky has the worst best friends 70 odd years of intermittent cryofreeze can buy, and Natasha loves her boys. Sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't call me unless you're dying

**Author's Note:**

> Slight AU where the Avengers and Bucky all work together, more or less, and Civil War isn't just waiting to tear my heart out. This was going to be part of a longer fic at one point, but I never finished it and now I can't remember what it was about, so I'm just calling this piece of evidence #473000 that Bucky's life sucks.

“It’s 3:17 in the afternoon, which, I realize, is not significant for you, but I’m on a very tight schedule in regards to sleeping, where I do 43 minutes every 19 hours, it’s this new-”

“You said not to call unless I’m dying.” 

Tony stops talking so abruptly that Bucky thinks he can hear Stark’s teeth crack. 

“What? Are you- why aren’t you- where are you?” It’s some kind of achievement, Stark is actually at a loss for words. Bucky wonders if he will get an award for that, with tiny trumpets and confetti and a woman in a red dress who hands him a plaque that says ‘The world thanks you for a brief moment of silence from Stark tower.’ That would be nice. 

“Don’t know,” he says. “North of Brisbane, maybe less than a hundred miles.” It’s kind of pathetic, really. He’s going to die in a fucking desert and a kangaroo will probably eat his face. Who dies in Australia? Does HYDRA even know what Australia is? Most of them can’t even tie their shoes without an instruction manual. Bucky would be willing to bet his last clean pair of socks that he shamelessly stole from Steve’s drawer because he didn’t want to do his own laundry that the HYDRA outpost he found here thinks they’re in Kuwait. They’re probably trying to drill for oil behind that shack they call headquarters. Bucky hopes the kangaroos eat them first. 

“Ok, yeah, smiles, I’m gonna need more than that. What the hell are you even doing? Does your patriotic life partner know you’re there? Is this a joke? If you need me to buy you something, ask Pepper. She’s in charge of the throw money at Stark Industries dubious allies fund.”

“Do you ever just shut the fuck up?” Bucky’s chest hurts, and Tony is goddamn annoying. He wants to tell him that at least once, in case no one else has ever mentioned it. 

“No. If you wanted someone to listen to you breathing like a wet rag over a radiator you could have called Hawkeye. He would have put you on speaker and gone back to sleep. Again, what are you doing? Are you dying, dying? Not ‘I got really excited because they were having a sale at the all black everything emporium and I wanted to be first in line,’ but like, dying dying?” 

“Fucking christ,” Bucky says. “Goddamn asshole. Shut up. Yes.”

“Um.” Stark is quiet again. Bucky likes that. “Do we even have anyone on Australia, what the hell are you doing there? Look I can hear you breathing like that but you’re just going to have to hold your damn lungs in until we can get you to a hospital ok. I don’t need Capsicle punching a hole through my face because I let his boyfriend die.” 

Bucky considers telling Stark just how many dicks he can eat, but it seems like a waste of energy, given current conditions. 

“Need you to take care of Steve. Not you, because you’re an ass. Maybe bird man. Not bow and arrow bird man, he’s an ass too. Other one.” Why is it so hot. Why can’t he breathe. Bucky tries to focus, to make stupid not genius Stark understand. “No more letting him get hurt. Please.” Bucky pauses, trying to find meaningful last words. “And shut the hell up once in a while.”

 

Bucky wakes up in a hospital bed, and Steve is sitting in the chair next to him, staring like he is trying to nonverbally smother Bucky in 70 years worth of love and drill holes into his skull at the same time. “Hey buddy, you’re alive, that’s great. Are you fine? You look fine.” Steve takes a deep breath and Bucky tries to sink through his hospital bed. “You said you were going out for a little bit, and you left the continent and flew around the world to take out an entire HYDRA base on your own. You know, ‘taking all the stupid with you’ was not meant to be a challenge.” Steve takes a deep breath, like he’d probably been holding that in the entire time he sat there. At least he must have been taking notes all the times Bucky gave him a lecture over being Captain Reckless Asshole. 

“How are you feeling?” 

Bucky thinks that if he is dead, this must be hell because heaven would be quieter, and that gentler note in Steve’s voice wouldn’t make him feel like he’d just broken his ma’s best china plate again. 

“Urgh,” he says. 

“I think that’s super soldier strength tranquilizer for ‘good and properly chastised by my mistakes’,” Natasha says from somewhere to his right. Bucky opens his eyes and glares but she just smiles, sitting across from Steve. Fantastic, now he’s surrounded by two people who won’t let him be dead in peace. 

“Come on Buck, Nat’s the one who found you and kept you stable until we could get a medevac team to you. She carried you all the way to the field hospital so Hydra wouldn’t find you first.” 

Bucky tries to picture Romanov striding through the outback and valiantly rescuing him, but his mental image of the event insists that she would have put pigtails in his hair and taken a selfie with his unconscious body first. 

“Well, I stole a car and stopped for a milkshake, but more or less, yeah. You seemed fine.”

That figures. 

“I had 24 bullets in my thoracic cavity, both my lungs were collapsed, and a huge spider bit me on the ass,” Bucky says, in a voice that is mild for regular people and bordering on a shriek for an ex-brainwashed assassin. Why can’t these people give him a break. Just a tiny little break, that’s all Bucky asks for. Just a tiny bit of acknowledgement that life has not been good to James Buchanan Barnes, and he could use a little kindness once in a while.

“Baby,” Natasha says, and pokes him in the ribs. 

Bucky misses the kangaroos.

 

Far across the city, Tony Stark looks up from a pile of robot parts and stares out the window. “Jarvis, route all incoming calls from anyone but Pep to Rogers for the next month. I think these people are giving me an ulcer.” 

“Yes, sir,” Jarvis says, and does nothing of the sort.


End file.
